Conference Coverage

Payers part of the drug-pricing problem, says FDA commissioner


 

REPORTING FROM AHIP 2018


His comments received a quick rebuttal from AHIP.

“There is a lot of blame being pushed around,” Daniel Nam, AHIP executive director of federal programs, said in an interview. “Along with the blame are a lot of distractions, misdirections, and these easy one-off fixes or problems that pop their head up and come and go. ... We try to stay focused on what is the real problem and that is essentially the starting price.”

He noted that if a treatment has a high starting price, such at coming gene therapies that could cost $1 million per patient, “it creates a pressure on the industry and it threatens our health care system to be unsustainable in the long term. What we are worried about is that there is no check on [the pharmaceutical industry’s] ability to set high list prices and even subsequently increase them.”

Mr. Nam noted that there is a fine balance that needs to be achieved to allow manufacturers to profit while at the same time ensuring access to therapies at reasonable prices.

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